“Twenty years of reactionary government and the persistent efforts of Lord Curzon to weaken the foundations of our national life and to blast our national hopes have brought home to us the importance of self-help and self-reliance in the making of a prosperous and progressive Indian nation.”
OCTOBER 20, 1905
The dawn of a great epoch
IS THERE AN INDIAN IN ANY PART OF INDIA WHOSE BOSOM DOES not heave with emotion and hope on reflecting on the signs of the new born patriotism in evidence at the present moment everywhere, from one end of the country to the other? For over twenty years the moribund forces of national revivification have been struggling into fresh birth, and today we behold the inspiring and awful spectacle of a great and ancient people stirred into a noble self-consciousness and realising in their own hopeful and buoyant minds the new turn that their history is taking. India is on the eve of a new epoch in the history of her national career. Centuries of metaphysical dream and mental inertia brought on by continued misrule and social chaos had almost taken away all vitality from her mental as well as physical manhood. The dry bones lay in the open valley for centuries, no noise was heard nor a shaking visible. But though doomed to death, they were not destined to die. Though there was no breath in them, yet on the establishment of British supremacy which brought together the scattered atoms and moulded them into one shape, the word went forth,
“Come from the four winds Obreath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.”
For a century-and-a-half, British supremacy has been blowing gently on the extinct spark of India’s life and had roused a hope that the spark might soon begin to glow and burn again, and fill the inert mould with vital warmth. Naturally at such a stage the nation owes more to the sympathy and beneficence of its foreign rulers than to its own great men. Still, the spark in the languid genius of the nation has now and again appeared bright in the career of a few ardent patriotic souls, who tried to rouse into active life the prostrate body. From Raja Rammohan down to Rao Bahadur Ranade, several noble souls appeared and blew into the vitals of the people the genial heat that spread abroad from the new influences of the West. Other men that succeeded them have continued the noble task and carried the mission of national emancipation to the remotest parts of the land. Their labours have borne fruit in the progress of the process of rejuvenation and in the consummation that we now behold.
For fifty years, our leaders and their humble lieutenants have toiled on the field of politics in the hope that the mighty and enlightened nation to whose custody the destiny of their country is entrusted, would fulfil its promises and gradually raise it to a state of dignity and status, to a state of expanding liberty and growing self-respect. Their toil has not been indeed altogether fruitless; but, on the whole, the result has been certainly disappointing.
The failure of our efforts in the past to reach our ends through political liberty having failed, the conviction is dawning on our minds that a more certain means of reaching them is to bring about a material upheaval, thereby filling the national mind with greater hopefulness and more self-confidence and bringing to our struggle the invaluable strength of abundant material resources. A poverty-stricken people in a drooping and despondent spirit can make little headway against the passive obstruction of an unwilling alien rule and, in the failure of our endeavours till now without the essential sinews of war, we have had ample experience of this melancholy fact. We have risen to the conviction that the path to national regeneration is paved with money as well as with less tangible materials and we now manifest this consciousness by the increasing attention given to questions relating to our material interests in our organs of public opinion and by the wonderful enthusiasm that sways the national mind in every part of the country under the comprehensive idea of Swadesism, which is, in other words, the concentration of our resources on the acquiring of independence in regard to our material requirements. We have not certainly lost sight of our political ends, but we try to open for ourselves a new path along which we believe the Promised Land might be reached in a shorter time and with less solid obstacles. India is truly in the parting of ways; without abandoning the field of politics, on which some people, not too friendly to our national aspirations, say our salvation does not lie, we mean to plough the field of industrial activity in the hope of reaping a more plentiful harvest. The Swadesi Movement is only, as we said a few days ago in these columns, a further and more tangible stage in the departure that was made at the end of Lord Ripon’s benign rule. Twenty years of reactionary government and the persistent efforts of Lord Curzon to weaken the foundations of our national life and to blast our national hopes have brought home to us the importance of self-help and self-reliance in the making of a prosperous and progressive Indian nation.
No country in the world stood at the threshold of a new epoch opening more awful responsibilities resting on its people, and more mighty possibilities, than the one at which India stands today. Will the people prove equal to the situation? Our Anglo-Indian friends naturally ask the question, will the new born enthusiasm visible everywhere last long and bear enduring fruit, or will it vanish into thin air after a short duration of delusive brightness. In their own hearts they answer the question in the affirmative. Their wish is father to their thought.
Will the leading men of India, men of light and leading, public men and silent well-wishers, prove by their apathy and weakness that our critics are right, or will they belie their sinister prediction by a manful determination to carry the stage of transition to a stage of practical and lasting fruition? Will they show that they cherish sincere love for their motherland, the land whose tenderness for her millions of sons has preserved them from extinction and whose noble thoughts and traditions have secured even today a small comer of sympathy and regard in the hearts of the nations of the world for the name of the Aryan race, the race that kindled the lamp of civilisation when darkness brooded over the whole world.
Let us remember that the demand of India on the duty and sacrifice of her sons is greater than the demand which any land made on its children, for she has suffered for us as no other country suffered for its people. Yet, how little is the sacrifice that we have made for this hallowed and hoary land of our birth! now the very feeling of patriotism had been foreign to us; indeed, even now there are many among the educated classes who are ashamed of calling themselves patriots and blush at being called by that name. History records with pride the names of those benefactors of their fellow-creatures who redeemed them from the grasp of native tyrants or from the yoke of foreigners, and in every country in the world patriotism is cherished as a noble feeling and the patriot as the pride and the hope of its people. In India alone this feeling evokes no response and lovers of their country have to profess their feeling in silent whispers.
Let us try to rise above this unworthy and weakening tendency towards self-abasement, and recognising that there is no nobler sentiment than patriotism and no greater honour than to be known as a patriot, let us consecrate our life and everything that we have to the regeneration and honour of our country.
We are now in the habit of looking to Japan as our model and guide. But the Japanese have never shown themselves to be lacking in courage or self-confidence. “Once their leaders,” says an English critic, “have determined on a course of action they carry it through, irrespective of cost in life or treasure.” Will our people do likewise and earn the gratitude of posterity and the applause of the world?
Reference:
The First 100
A Selection of Editorials, 1878-1978, THE HINDU, VOLUME I